This application claims the priority of Korean Patent Application No. 2002-74352, filed on Nov. 27, 2002, in the Korean Intellectual Property Office, the disclosure of which is incorporated herein in its entirety by reference.
1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a routing technique for transmitting packets to a desired destination over the Internet, and more particularly, to an Internet protocol (IP) address lookup system and method for forwarding a packet on a data plane of a router.
2. Description of the Related Art
As the number of Internet users has rapidly increased and Internet services have been remarkably diversified, Internet traffic has exponentially grown. Accordingly, a technique of searching for a desired destination to which a packet is to be transmitted as fast as possible and then forwarding the packet over the Internet has been suggested.
One of the main functions of a router is to forward a packet so that the packet can be successfully transmitted to a final destination. To forward a packet over the Internet, the router searches for an address and output port of a next hop router to which the packet is to be transmitted.
In the case of an early version of router, the time taken to search for and process a destination of a packet is shorter than the time taken to transmit the packet to the destination along a transmission path connected to the router. Thus, the early version of router can connect sub-networks to one another over the Internet without difficulty. These days, the time taken for a router to transmit a packet has been relatively reduced, as compared with the time taken for the router to search for and process the packet, and Internet traffic has exponentially increased. However, the performance of the router processing packets has not been enhanced in accordance with the speed of transmitting data. A backbone router capable of dealing with a few hundred giga bytes or a number of tera bytes, in particular, may undesirably serve as a bottleneck section on the Internet.